the study of the diverse environments, places, and spaces of the Earth ’s surface and their interactions; it seeks to answer the questions of why things are as they are, where they are. The modern academic discipline of geography is rooted in ancient practice, concerned with the characteristics of places, in particular their natural environments and peoples, as well as the interrelations between the two. Its separate identity was first formulated and named some 2,000 years ago by the Greeks, whose geo and graphein were combined to mean “earth writing” or “earth description.” However, what we now understand as geography was elaborated before then, in the Arab world and elsewhere. Ptolemy, author of one of the discipline’s first books, Guide to Geography (2nd century ad), defined geography as “a representation in pictures of the whole known world together with the phenomena which are contained therein.” This expresses what many still consider geography’s essence—a description of the...